Another in the long, sad, history of bad ideas: The Printed Blog aims to create a newspaper out of blog posts. In case you're unfamiliar with the context of blogs and newspapers, I'm offering a flow chart. Observe:

Newspaper--television--Internet--blogs.

The Printed Blog is a bit like going to the grocery store, buying a carton of milk, then going to a farm and feeding that milk to a cow. Blogs are a fine platform for distributing individual opinions about the news (and other sordid topics) quickly. Blogs are rarely fact-checked; many aren't edited. And they frequently find their news at traditional news sources.

So why should people buy a newspaper whose contents have been barely edited, may have come from dubious sources, and recap news stories already available online and elsewhere? TPB seems to think it will have the advantage of being tactile and available to readers in transit. But why would readers forgo The New York Times' in-depth coverage of Hamid Karzai's estrangement from the Obama administration for SuzyPants99875's take on it?

I'm amazed at what rich people will put money behind. No wonder we're in this financial mess.

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